Moscow Film Festival removes from the screening a film about the persecution of gays

As director Galkin told reporters, the 25-minute film "Fans" was included in the "short film" program and was supposed to be shown at 20.00 on April 23 at the Central House of Cinema. The film is still listed on the schedule on the MIFF website. But on April 21, it turned out that there would be no screening.

“The administration of the festival, without explaining the reasons, removed the film from the screening. The Redland is still alive”, - the director wrote on social media.

As clarifies the TV channel Dozhd, a representative of the Moscow International Film Festival, who was engaged in the selection of Russian short films, contacted Galkin and said: "I really liked your film, but we were categorically banned from showing it".

According to Snob, Fans is the story of two skinheads from Moscow killing gays and having sexual relations with each other. The 25-minute drama is based on real events: in 2016, police detained two football fans on suspicion of killing six people in Moscow. Among their victims was a refugee from the DPR. In 2018, Spartak and CSKA fans were sentenced to real terms for murder. The state did not finance the creation of this film: Galkin collected money for the shooting on a crowdfunding platform. In 2020, Fans were nominated for awards at the Oslo and Dublin Film Festivals.

As the director noted, he does not know that the administration of the film festival was more "strained".

“There is also such a background: in the film there is television propaganda in the background, on TV they show either about the war in Donbass, or about gay pride parades”, - Galkin said.

Earlier in the Russian box office, films about same-sex love were repeatedly censored. So, in the spring of 2021, three minutes were cut from the British drama Supernova in Russia, which depicts an attempt by the main characters to have sex. This caused outrage from the creators of the picture, who declared the importance of the LGBTQ component in the tape.

In 2019, in the Russian box office, the film "Rocketman" about the life of Elton John was cut out episodes with gay sex, male kisses and drugs. The distributors indicated that this was done at the request of Russian law.

On the eve of the President of the Moscow International Film Festival, film director Nikita Mikhalkov, who was awarded an Oscar in 1995 for the film Burnt by the Sun, criticized the new requirements of the film academy for the nominees for the Best Film award, calling them discrimination and “moral fury”.

From now on, in order to qualify for victory, directors are required to include people of Asian, African or Latin American origin in the crew and performers of the main roles, or supporting roles. At least a third of the crowd must be women, people of color, LGBT people, or people with disabilities, both physical and mental.

“This is mirror discrimination... Demonicism, in Russian. This is some kind of moral fury that has swept the world. Maybe I shouldn't have said this, because I have an Oscar and I was happy when I received it, but when I understand that now in order, relatively speaking, to qualify for an Oscar, it's necessary to observe such rules... Soviet censorship is just baby talk”, - Mikhalkov said.